On Monday our resident must have gadget geek was slavering and becoming worryingly excited over his new 3GS iPhone. It was quite horrible.

Today he is bitching about something not seen since the 1990's: utterly sh1te battery life. Now he has been playing with it quite a lot but 5 hours!!

Seems he is not alone:

"There's still no smoking gun," said Aaron Vronko, the CEO of Rapid Repair, an iPhone repair shop. "But the processor in the iPhone 3GS can use 50% more power in some situations than its predecessor. I'd bet that Apple missed some key interactions between the iPhone's software and the processor in the last update that causes it to over-utilise the CPU, especially since [the complaints] came after the software update."

Vronko was referring to the iPhone 3.1 update that Apple shipped two weeks ago.

Most of the users grousing on the Apple support forum who identified their iPhone's model said they were using the 3GS, although some said they had seen battery life drop off on their iPhone 3G smartphones as well.

In fact, complaints about battery consumption started in June, when Apple rolled out the iPhone 3.0 software.

The clamor grew even louder after users installed iPhone 3.1, and shows no sign of abating. One thread on the topic, which debuted Sept. 10, has more than 570 individual posts, and has been read by over 40,000 people, an extremely high number for Apple's forum.

"I'm glad this is an actual problem. I thought I was just going crazy," said "iPhil" Monday afternoon on that well-trafficked thread. "After [iPhone] 3.1, battery sometimes doesn't even last an entire day with no additional talk than I had using 3.0."

"The day after I installed the 3.1 firmware, everything changed. I have to charge the iPhone in the middle of the day to be able to have enough battery to get home," added "help with iPhone."

I have the 3GS as well. The battery life is ok, not great. When you 1st get it, and constantly fiddle with it then it does drain quite quickly. Once the novelty wears off it lasts longer, and isn't that bad.